TALES OF THE VINE

‘Is wine carbon neutral or does it contribute to global warming?’

Relax, wine is as green as a leprechaun landscaper’s thumb. Even Al Gore drinks wine. And compared to the average parliamentarian or any randomly selected bus operating on Phuket’s congested roads, the wine industry spews out a lot less gas than they do and contributes little to the problem of global warming.

A great deal of work on the net carbon intake and output of the wine industry has been carried out by researchers at the University of California, Davis. Their studies have found that if you look at all aspects of wine, from grape growing to manufacturing to bottling and transport, the process of making and selling wine is carbon neutral. That is, the amount of oxygen put into the air by grapevines is roughly the same as all carbon released into the atmosphere by processing and supply chain activities.

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Weddings are meant to be joyous occasions but for event organizers they can be a personal hell. Everyone involved in weddings seems to become increasingly on edge as the date gets closer and tempers sometimes flare, bringing out a measure of nastiness out of place at such a happy event.

I will never forget the time a wedding went bad while I was a general manager at one of the Pacific Northwest’s best known wineries. The beautiful winery grounds were the venue for weddings throughout the spring months and the wedding managers were experienced hands at these events. How, then, could they have allowed the groom and bride to become so drunk they began to fight with each other at their own wedding is still a mystery to me. The fiasco ended when the staff called the sheriff and had the groom arrested for assault. Thank god it was my day off.

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Hallo mister, where you go? Darling, buy me drink you so handsome.

What kind of wine should you take to a place like that? Your visiting friends insist you take them there. You got lost while searching the side sois for the bootery that made your alligator belt and ended up there, instead. It was the only place with a tuk tuk parked outside (no one will buy that one), it’s the only place where you can find someone of your own skill level at Get Four. Whatever the excuse, you will go. Everyone does. So why not go with a good wine?

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The first thing I always ask students when teaching an introductory wine course is, ‘what is wine?’ It is amazing how few wine lovers, even food and beverage professionals, can precisely define what wine is.

Wine, as we all know or should know, is fermented grape juice. It is one of mankind’s oldest and most natural processed foods and is the basis of the earliest human civilizations. People respire; yeast ferment. And despite fermentation being a natural occurrence in all living organisms of the eukaryotic kingdom - like yeast, and in many prokaryotes, how fermentation takes place in yeast is something of a mystery for most of us.

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All wines have life cycles just like people, businesses and even nations. Wines are born of fermentation, developed under the care of winemakers and then sent out into the world to meet their ultimate fate of acceptance or rejection before they fade away and die.

In thinking about the life cycle of any wine it can be said that the inherent potential of the grape variety is the wine’s father and the quality of the soil and climate where the grape is grown is its mother. These factors are the virtual DNA of wine and their interaction gives rise to the inherent potential of any wine’s greatness and longevity.
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A young man’s first older woman. I will never forget her. Her boss was the lieutenant governor. We really should not have been there at her condo on the carpet in front of the fire, sharing secrets, drinking Piesporter Goldtrophen Riesling and Blue Nun.

This was the Summer of 42 in a tight wool sweater and it tasted even better than the Strawberry flavored wines of high school that traveled with me in the back seat of my Pontiac Lemans when I would sneak out with the new girl from Hawaii who just moved to the town where I lived. And the best part was that there would be no overgrown, fuming father and brothers looking for me the next day.

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Phuket has been through a lot in the past seven years; SARS, Bird Flue, a Tsunami, a military coup, and now Kenny G 24-hours a day on 90.5 fm. Let’s hope this next year is better and that we can all get on with getting down to the beach with a chilled bottle of wine, which is why we moved here in the first place.

Now, time once again for my hard-hitting, no holds barred wine predictions for the coming new year. As an Aquarius, my predictions are based solely upon my gut, which has been getting larger with onset of middle age, but also a dash of experience thrown in for good measure. I accept no responsibility, however, for anyone who loses their life savings or even a bet for beer because of my predictions.

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